The present application is directed to the planning and scheduling arts, and more particularly to planning and scheduling of jobs for the production or manufacture of products, where the products may be produced or manufactured at a plurality of distributed sites or shops.
The problem of planning and scheduling in a distributed manufacturing environment with multiple shop locations is a natural extension to the basic “single-site” setup in which all production activities take place at one centralized location. To better consolidate resources and reduce costs, there is a need to provide high-throughput planning and scheduling capabilities for “multi-site” shops with geographical constraints. This feature is now missing from existing document production toolkits, such as the Lean Document Production (LDP) toolkit developed by Xerox Corporation. The absence of this capability in existing toolkits, limits their application to multi-site or shop environments.
Lean Document Production (LDP) offered by Xerox is a successful example of cellular manufacturing for the printing industry. LDP organizes equipment and resources in a print shop into separate cells, in order to increase the efficiency of print shop layout which in turn eliminates workflow bottlenecks, and reduces work-in-progress in the print shop. LDP implementations have so far been applied to shops that assume a single geographical location (i.e., single-site shops), and the option to schedule jobs among multiple single-site shops has been left largely unexplored. One reason for this is that multi-site scheduling can be computationally expensive, especially since some of the large single-site shops have already caused the current LDP toolkit to run out of memory or take several hours to find a complete schedule. While some of these issues can be fixed with a more efficient implementation, the lack of a formal scheduling framework for dealing with shops spanning multiple geographical locations presents a challenge. Simply put, there is currently no multi-site scheduling capability in LDP or similar products for the printing industry.